Search-and-Rescue missions and missions requiring access to areas of denied access (such as caves and buildings) create challenges for keeping warfighters connected and for reliable exfiltration of situation-awareness data. Networked communication is hindered by line-of-sight communication and also uncertainty in the position of the warfighters. Static solutions that place relay nodes at fixed locations fail to survive the dynamics of the networking needs (e.g., changing demands and warfighter positions) as well as the uncertainty of the channel conditions (e.g., limited and/or noisy line-of-sight communications). As a result, mobility of warfighters often breaks mission-critical communication links. Statically placed relays nodes may only provide radio coverage to a fixed set of locations. These locations need to be pre-specified and may only be changed by a warfighter—manually moving a relay node.
Current manual approaches to deploying and setting up robust ad-hoc wireless networks in in-door and obstacle-rich environments is labor intensive and furthermore such statically configured networks fail to adapt to the dynamics of the physical and network environment. Current approaches to deal with such situations are human intensive and can require planning, RF measurements, and manual placement of relay nodes. Such approaches may fail in in-accessible environments and in-door hostile environments typical of special operations missions. Other approaches based on robotic navigation via map construction and landmark identification may necessitate use of costly and labor-intensive global positioning systems (GPS), laser range finders, and/or camera devices but may fail to work due to not considering the dynamic RF environment in the map construction process